Hey folks. Capone in Chicago here.

When I studied film history in college, my concentration was on the history of documentaries. I never miss a documentary that comes through Chicago, and I go out of my way to track down others that never open here. I contact filmmakers and distributors looking for screeners and commercially released docs. I don't have a particular favorite style or process; I don't prefer narration or no narration; talking heads vs. recreations; filmmakers who keep their distance or ones that inject themselves into the proceedings. I'm not saying I love all docs, certainly not. When one works, it's undeniable. I love learning about small corners of the world and events that I was totally unaware of before learning about them in a documentary. I love discovering bands whose music was a total mystery to me. I relish in meeting colorful characters, being horrified by human injustices, and finding out the story behind the story. But seeing as many docs as I do in a given year sets me up to see a lot of examples of unoriginal presentation, which is why I love, love, love the approach Brett Morgen takes when he tackles a subject. THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE speaks for itself (literally). Morgen doesn't care if Hollywood mogul Robert Evans is always being 100 percent honest; he's more concerned with the myth than the reality. And much the same can be said for his latest effort, CHICAGO 10.

The story of the defendants and their lawyers who made up the CHICAGO 10 has been the source of more straight-forward documentaries and recreations in the past (plus, it appears that Steven Spielberg may make the trial the subject of his next feature). The group of militant hippie organizers, who staged marches and demonstrations during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, was on trial for setting the stage for rioting in the streets. When you read the transcripts, the trials seems like a farce; when you see the way Morgen brings them to life, you realize it was an outright tragedy. CHICAGO 10 (which opened the 2007 Sundance Film Festival) will probably best be remembered for its innovative use of animation and celebrity voices to bring the trial to life, and that's both a good and bad thing. As memorable as the animation is, the film has several other strengths, including some of the cleanest and most vivid archival footage of the riots and everything leading up to them. Living here for so long, you can't avoid seeing riot footage at some point, whether it's at one of the semi-regular revivals of MEDIUM COOL or in any number of profiles of Abbie Hoffman or Tom Hayden or Bobby Seale. But I've never seen the footage so colorful and scary. Plus, Morgen has created a sound mix that will blow your mind. At any given moments during the riots, you hear voices all around you, sounding like a fight has just broken out in the theater.

Although I hesitate to name names, there are just a few too many cool people providing voices for the film's animated sequences. Liev Schreiber, Jeffrey Wright, Hank Azaria, Mark Ruffalo, Nick Nolte, Dylan Baker and the late, great Roy Scheider as Judge Julius Hoffman, a man so crazed with hatred for hippies, you couldn't write a character this wild. As he did with Robert Evans, director Morgen isn't interested in strictly telling the story or representing the trial. As much as he loves perpetuating the myth of the late '60s, hippies and the radicalism of the counterculture, he also wants to make it perfectly clear that the folks on trial weren't dummies. They were, in fact, partly to blame for how those events in Grant Park went down, maybe not as much as the original Mayor Daley's shoot-to-kill policy that he issued to the police and National Guard, but there's plenty of guilt to parcel out amongst all participants. Some documentary purists may squirm and wine about the nature of Brett Morgen's style, but it's rare to see a visionary filmmaker attempting something in the documentary arena. CHICAGO 10 is a great record of history as well as a fantastic visual accomplishment.

Capone